Little Things

When writing, I always sit at my usual place, from where I have a clear view of nature. Now, in winter, I have an opportunity to watch birds flying into the feeder, then with a sunflower seed flying away to sit down on a branch of a nearby spruce or a pine-tree, enjoying the goodies that I had prepared for them. I observe how they feed themselves, how they squabble, and I feel so good. I feel good not only because I contributed to this wonderful performance, but also because I am part of it. I love life... Life - in all its forms and with all its endless variations. I can say that as I grow older, grows also my desire not to miss one single opportunity, not to leave one such moment unused. In these times I keep saying to myself, over and over again, without a simple trace of self-compulsion and self-persuasion – that life is magical.

I am living a very open life and I am meeting many people. Many of them I meet repeatedly, others I meet for the first time. Every such occasion is repeatedly an opportunity for me, for both of us, for every one of us, to grant ourselves an unrepeatable magic of mutual enrichment, provided that we allow ourselves to be open and thereby give ourselves the free space for perception of something new.

Many times, during personal conversations, I have an opportunity to notice, how many people live with mistaken, or at least distorted, conceptions. One of the most frequent misconceptions is an idea that a person in his life shall come across some kind of a "grand event". This notion is, however, the least probable to be fulfilled. In the outermost case, such a person expects a gift of insight. There is a higher probability that this seeker, due to his own personal endeavor, will get to a situation, which he later recognizes as a situational catalyst, as a new, deeper start upon his Journey.

After some time, if the seeker succeeds in recognizing the value of such a situation with a maximal degree of personal experience, then he can mark this situation as The Event. During our life many of us prepare ourselves for such a situation. However, many of us don’t prepare for it beforehand in a way to be able to subsequently maximize the gain from it.

The quality of our existing life determines the possibility of achieving a full success in this context. Everybody decides for himself this quality by using his character virtues. One of them is sensitivity - perception of details, ability to see the extraordinary beauty even in the routine of everyday life. Every action, even the most insignificant one, our every deed, an act of another person, everything has its contexts. We have a possibility to perceive our actions as removed from this context, and we have an identical possibility to try to understand this context in a way, how we presently can. Through this effort, we pave the way for a much deeper understanding of ordinary, "trivial" little things of our everyday life, and enhance our life with them. The causality of our lives resides among others also in the fact, that we can also miss our "grand event”, just because we are not ready to understand the little things, which precedes this "grand event".

Hardly anybody doubts the usefulness of an optimistic view of the world. For a stubborn pessimist it is certainly hard to accept this fact. A person, who is closed in his negative way of looking at things, can hardly recognize the value of situations, in which he finds himself and which he himself also creates. At the same time, the best opportunity, how to get closer to the "grand event", is open-mindedness to even the most delicate signals of our bodies and souls when meeting with other people, through interpersonal relationships.

Let’s learn to be friends with ourselves, to register subtle changes in the behavior of other people towards us, in response to our conduct. The journey towards a deeper understanding of ourselves must be connected with a desire to deepen our sensitivity to notice the smallest changes accompanying human relations. Are we willing to achieve a deeper level of perception? Are we ready to open wide not only our eyes, but also our hearts? Can we cease to see the world with gloomy eyes and not be pushed any more to the corner by all the negative news that is attacking us from all sides? By doing that we prepare for ourselves the necessary base to start noticing, in an increasing level, the "little things” of everyday life that we didn’t perceive before. A neighbor doesn’t infuriate us any more, he is suddenly not irritating to us so much? Well, as a matter of fact, he never was, it was only our perception of him! The driver that took our planned parking place that we saw first, didn’t upset us so much any more? There are little things, and then little things. A change of our attitude towards life, an adjustment of our life’s priorities, can help us remove some of these little things from life, and prepare a free space for the others. As soon as we dissociate ourselves without nostalgia with the first ones, then the others will start building a bright background, on which the picture of the "grand event” clearly emerges. Life will get a new direction, a new sweet fragrance.

Thereby, we enrich our senses, we delight ourselves, but mostly our soul will rejoice. Everything depends on our decision; our dreamed goal doesn't always have to remain only dreamed forever. To love life means to love oneself, with a purity and humility, with an anticipated depth of what we actually carry all the time with us, nesting inside our hearts. However, we will not reveal this secret, until we start looking around us, until we start discovering, perhaps even with a big amazement, the little things, these odds and ends, that will lead us towards our "grand event". Don’t wait for “Godot” - the "grand event"; the "little things" have far greater significance; there are much more of them, an infinite number of them.

Jan Konfršt